Speak Easy
by lazarov
Summary: Sometimes Matt drags Clint to Chinatown for unique cocktails in hip bars and sometimes he drags him there for cheap, put-hair-on-your-chest baiju. Either way, Clint likes it better when Matt invites him to Harlem for good beer and good music. (That is, Netflix's Daredevil & Matt Fraction's Hawkeye like to go drinking together on Tuesday nights.)
1. Chapter 1

Clint catches a baton in the jaw and Matt feels an arrow whizz just a little too close to his ear and even though they meet by accident, they instantly decide they like each other.

* * *

Tuesday evenings become reserved for drinks on neutral turf, which usually means anywhere that isn't Midtown because Clint knows too many people in the city. (Matt only knows, like, five people. Tops.)

So they take turns choosing dive bars and ritzy cocktail joints. Clint usually likes the former, but sometime's he'll drag Matt to the latter just because he thinks it's funny the way the waiters treat them like they're on their first date.

Other times, he'll drag Matt to exclusive West Village speakeasies that smell like bourbon and moustache wax. He says it's easier to get in when the bouncers take pity on his blind companion - plus, he explains, the girls there are always _real cute._

(Like Matt _wouldn't know._ )

Sometimes Matt drags Clint to Chinatown for unique cocktails in hip bars and sometimes he drags him there for cheap, put-hair-on-your-chest _baiju_. Either way, Clint likes it better when Matt invites him to Harlem for a good beer and good music.

* * *

"And then we blew up the bunker and flew away in our invisible spy plane," Clint finishes, taking a sip of his drink as punctuation. He sets it down next to his hearing aid, which he's carelessly tossed onto the sticky table. (It's usually Matt's job to make sure he pockets it before they leave, because five-drinks-deep Clint can't be relied on to pay his tab let alone remember his expensive personal belongings.) "You know. Boring Saturday stuff."

" _Boring Saturday stuff._ You're just too cool for me, Barton," Matt shrugs, tapping his fingers against the glass of his old fashioned. "Hanging around with superspies and superheroes and, you know, arms-dealing rich people. Or so I assume," he adds with a self-conscious cough.

"You forgot the Norse god."

Matt cringes a little, but he makes a good show at hiding it by taking another swig of his drink. "Uh huh."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Norse golden calf." Clint grins at him. "The way you just winced, I think you and Rogers would get along just fine."

He doesn't bother to lower his voice for the name-drop because the name-drop is innocuous out of his mouth; he knows very well that none of the people in this bar know who Hawkeye is, let alone _Clint Barton,_ because, well, it'd be an understatement to say the press weren't much interested in an arrow-shooting dude's involvement in the Battle of New York. He's cool with it, though (except for a teeny-tiny, deeply-hidden part of his ego).

"Nope," Matt shakes his head. " _Nope._ "

"Yeah, yeah, spare me." Clint rolls his eyes and sighs. "You still believe in secret identities. I can't promise that I'll stop bugging you about it, though." He adds, quickly, like ripping off a band-aid: "I _may_ have mentioned you to Kate, in passing, _vaguely_. _So, so_ vaguely. But other than that, we're good."

Matt grimaces. "Come on."

"You come on! Can you blame me for having a hard time keeping this a secret? A blind, crime-fighting vigilante lawyer? Who, did I mention, _is blind_." He waves his hands in front of Matt's face to make his point, which is equal parts insulting and charming - or maybe unequal parts, but Matt can't really be bothered to be bothered.

Anyway, Matt's bourbon is _damn_ good: all charred oak and fruit notes and it's worth the pretentious atmosphere of the bar (there are _three_ separate-yet-identical debates going on in the building, and Matt wants to settle them all by screaming _vinyl-is-not-better-than-digital-trust-me-I-have-superhearing-just-shut-up_ but his bourbon is a satisfying enough distraction).

"Don't fetishize me," Matt says, only half-joking, as he signs covertly: F-U-C-K-Y-O-U, with one hand held up to shield the insult from the rest of the room like a sneaky schoolboy.

Clint snorts a laugh. "Yeah, fuck me for getting excited about making a pal who's down a sense too. Also? Cursing kind of loses its _oomph_ when you spell it out like that. May I?"

"Yeah, show me," Matt nods, an invitation for Clint to reach across the table and grab his hand. It's a gesture that could be awkward and overly-intimate, but Clint's hands are rough and to-the-point. Matt can sense heads turning in their direction, wondering what the fuck they're doing, but Clint doesn't seem to notice.

"Not exactly the same, but a close-enough sentiment," he explains as he works, pressing Matt's fingers down into a fist, leaving only his thumb and middle finger sticking straight out. "Now touch your chin with your thumb," he instructs. "Ta-da!"

"Like this?"

"So _rude_ ," Clint admonishes as Matt does as he's told. "I mean, how _dare_ you."

"Sure, sure. Alright, middle finger sticking out is obvious, plus the thumb…" Matt taps his thumb against his chin, thinking hard for the right sign. "It's some kind of ASL portmanteau?"

"You're calling me a motherfucker right now," Clint laughs, nodding. "Well done."

"Ah," Matt says, making a _whoops_ face and making a show of sitting on his hands. "Useful. Thanks."

Clint grins at him.

Matt grins back.


	2. Chapter 2

Clint settles into the sticky vinyl booth with a groan. He knows he smells like a pile of dirty laundry (and looks like one, too - these jeans haven't been washed since 2014, he's pretty sure) but he talked Matt into these plans days ago and he feels obligated to show up.

"Hey," Matt says cautiously. "You okay?"

( _Is obligated the right word?_ he wonders. No, it's the wrong word. Something implying respect and, like, bro-ship would be the right word, probably, but he isn't sure which word fits the bill and his head is too fuzzy and sore to try and track it down in his junkheap of a brain.)

"Everything is shit," he says, before amending: "That was overdramatic. Everything is not shit. Some things are shit, though." He points at the untouched glass of brown liquor sitting on the table between them: "Is that for me?"

"Bourbon," Matt nods, as Clint knocks back half. "I had a hunch you were having one of those days."

"How could you tell?"

He clears his throat and finishes his beer. "You were twenty minutes late, so I kind of just assumed."

"Thanks for assuming I was twenty minutes late because I'm having A Day and not because I'm an asshole." Clint means it. He sure feels like an asshole, anyway. He waves over a waitress (he has no idea if she's _their_ waitress, but she is a booze gatekeeper and therefore she will do) and orders two more beers and two more bourbons. "That wasn't all for me, in case you were wondering," he tells her. She rolls her eyes and walks away.

"Wanna talk about it? I mean, I don't want to overstep or anything."

Clint would really rather wiggle out of this conversation and spend the evening drinking his face off in a silence of mutual dude-understanding, but he shakes his head and says, "You're not. It's cool."

But he has a hard time working past 'it's cool' to tell Matt what's eating him, and so they sit together in silence until the waitress comes back and sets down their drinks. She smiles at Matt and tucks her hair behind her ear, before glancing down at the cane folded beside him in the booth and walking away. Clint slides Matt's beer towards him and clinks the bottle, twice, with his fingernail so Matt can zero in on it.

"Cheers." Matt takes a sip of his beer, and, for a second, gets a faraway look on his face. Clint can see his eyes, unfocused and dull, shift towards whatever he's listening to across the room and his forehead crinkles as he concentrates.

He glances, casually, around the bar and tries to guess which group is having the most interesting conversation. He eliminates the dudes in Mets jerseys, who, from their body language, are probably just re-enacting sports highlights, as well as the couple who (based on the fact that both are leaned in, enraptured by the conversation and ignoring their drinks, and neither are staring at their phones) are on their first date and trying to act interested in the minutiae of what the other one has to say.

 _You liar_ , Clint thinks in her direction, watching the girl rub her foot playfully against the guy's under the table, _you probably don't give a fuck what his favourite movie is. And it's probably something terrible, like Scarface or Varsity Blues or something. On second thought, don't let him take you home. He has bad taste in movies_. _You deserve better._

He looks away from the couple and turns back towards Matt, who's still distracted, frozen like a statue with his beer halfway to his mouth. "Who're you spying on? Are those pretty girls over there talking about how handsome I am?"

"I'm not spying," Matt murmurs, faux-scandalized, before his distraction wanes and he returns to their bubble of conversation. "So, what's up?"

Clint groans and wipes a hand over his face. "Okay," he begins, wincing. "So, the other day was kind of a fuck-up. My fingers slipped and I missed a shot and Nat ended up with a giant, bleeding hole in her thigh - God, that makes it sound like I shot her. I didn't shoot her. The other guy, the guy we were trying to take down, did. She's okay and everything, already back on her feet and giving me a hard time, like it never even happened. But it did happen, and it was so stupid and avoidable and it was my fault, you know?"

"I'd argue it was the fault of the, I don't know, space alien or cryogenically preserved Nazi or whatever that attacked her," Matt points out.

"It was some low-level terrorist pawn with a gun he barely knew how to use."

"Oh. That sucks," Matt agrees, frowning. He drums his fingers against the side of his beer for a moment, before clearing his throat and adding, "But, you know, to be fair?"

"Yeah?"

"Please correct me if I'm wrong," he says, carefully, "but I'm sure she's just glad it was her and not you."

Clint groans. "Those were her exact words, actually."

"And what's wrong with that?" Matt asks earnestly.

 _What's wrong with that_ , Clint mouths to himself, wrinkling his nose and taking a gulp of whiskey. He's pretty sure there's a lot wrong with that, but he can't think of a half-decent comeback. All he can think of is how many people he'd take a bullet for without a second thought. Or a first thought, at that. There are more than he can count on one hand, he realizes, maybe even two, and the knot of guilt wrapped tight around his internal organs, squishing them into a dense ball of anxiety, loosens a little.

He slumps in his seat, suddenly exhausted, and plants his elbows on the table, chin in his hands. "Can we drink a lot tonight? Please?"

"I've got nowhere to be," Matt nods. He reaches forward to find his glass of bourbon, then holds it out so Clint can clink it with his own.


End file.
